TELEVISION/RADIO

TELEVISION/RADIO; A Seldom-Seen Holocaust Image: The Resister

By BERNARD WEINRAUB

Published: November 4, 2001

LOS ANGELES—
IN April 1943, hundreds of young Jews many of them teenagers -- barricaded themselves in the Warsaw ghetto and began lobbing homemade bombs and firing stolen weapons at German troops. The Germans soon responded with tanks and artillery fire.

By May the revolt had been largely crushed. The Germans burned down the ghetto and gassed the escape tunnels. Most of the resisters had been killed. But the uprising -- which lasted longer than the Polish Army's resistance to the Germans -- is seen by its survivors and by historians not so much as one more horrifying moment in the Holocaust but as a symbol of extraordinary heroism.

''They were fighting with their fingernails; they wanted to live with honor and, if necessary, die with honor,'' said Jon Avnet, the director, executive producer and co-author, with Paul Brickman, of ''Uprising,'' a four-hour mini-series being shown tonight and tomorrow night on NBC. ''They were completely aware of the fact that they probably weren't going to live. But they never thought about it. They had to fight this evil -- and they did.''

The mini-series has consumed Mr. Avnet, the director of ''Fried Green Tomatoes'' and other films, since 1994. The Walt Disney company asked him and Mr. Brickman, the screenwriter of ''Risky Business'' and ''Men Don't Leave,'' to adapt Leon Uris's novel ''Mila 18,'' a fictionalized telling of the uprising. But as Mr. Avnet and Mr. Brickman began reading accounts of the Warsaw ghetto, and as they met survivors and visited Holocaust museums, their perspectives changed.

''I thought my education was pretty good about the Warsaw ghetto but, like a lot of people, I really didn't know that much,'' Mr. Avnet said, sitting in a restaurant near the Hollywood studio where he was working on last-minute editing. He arrived at the interview with books and dozens of black-and-white photos of the ghetto -- some of them taken by Jews, others by German soldiers -- that were reconstructed for the film.

As Mr. Avnet's knowledge deepened, he said, he became angrier.

''Have you ever seen the story of the resistance? Have you ever seen a Jew pick up a gun and kill a German in the Holocaust?'' asked Mr. Avnet, 51, who is Jewish. ''Why is it that the Jews were labeled as passive but the Rwandans, Ethiopians, Cambodians, Serbians were not?

''In some very profound way, the word 'passive' implicated the six million who perished in their own deaths. On a very real level, it was a final insult to their dignity.''

The story of the Warsaw ghetto uprising is both heroic and brutal. In early 1942 the Germans herded 500,000 people into an area of 840 acres, many of them with no housing. Thousands died of starvation and disease. By late 1942, as deportations to the Treblinka death camp accelerated, a group called the Jewish Fighting Organization took control of the ghetto and began creating underground hiding places. The resisters moved across rooftops, striking at German tanks and troops, and the Germans halted deportations of Jews until April 19. Then they launched a full-fledged military operation against the resistance, which lasted about a month, finally crushing it. Most of the young Jews chose to die fighting and kill as many German soldiers as they could. It was, as one leader of the uprising wrote to a colleague, ''a magnificent, heroic struggle.''

Mr. Avnet's obsession with the uprising -- and he acknowledged that he was a man obsessed -- was a central reason for NBC's decision to move ahead with the relatively costly ($22 million) project after film studios rejected it as too downbeat. Scott Sassa, the president of NBC West Coast, said he had approved the project because of a strong script and Mr. Avnet's determination. Another selling point was that young women played powerful roles in the uprising, widening the drama's potential appeal.

''We're trying to reach 18- to 49-year-olds,'' Mr. Sassa said. ''I can unfairly summarize their view of World War II as coming from 'Saving Private Ryan,' 'Schindler's List,' 'Pearl Harbor' and 'Band of Brothers.' We have not seen this kind of movie. It's not a Holocaust movie. It's about people heroically fighting back against evil and oppression, which is a pretty relevant theme right now.'' (NBC and Mr. Avnet were not pleased when CBS recently scheduled the twice-postponed Emmy Awards for tonight, pitting them against ''Uprising.'')

The screenplay is based almost entirely on real people and real events; some characters, like the members of a middle-class Jewish family ripped apart by the Germans, are composites. Despite Mr. Sassa's contention that it is not ''a Holocaust movie,'' the film touches on some controversial aspects of Holocaust history: the anti-Semitism of the Poles and their seeming indifference to the mass killings of Jews, the ineffectiveness of the Polish underground and the decision by the Roosevelt administration and the Churchill government not to bomb the death camps or the train tracks leading to them.

Much of the $22 million budget went to carefully reconstruct the Warsaw ghetto in an area the size of three football fields in Bratislava, Slovakia. Simha Rotem, a survivor of the uprising who visited the set, said it was so real that he started to shake when he saw it. The 77-year-old Mr. Roten, known as Kazik, said he had pointed to an apartment on the third floor of the set and said, ''I lived there.''